FIX YOUR TEXT BOXES - Why PowerPoint breaks your text boxes by default and how to fix it — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00(relaxing music)
2. 0:09- Hi, everybody.
3. 0:10This is Heinrich from Firm Learning and welcome back.
4. 0:13Welcome back to my channel where I try
5. 0:15to help you be successful in the first years of your career.
6. 0:19As you know, here if you are a constant listener
7. 0:22to my channel, one important skill to be successful
8. 0:25in many, many organizations is PowerPoint.
9. 0:28And in this video, I'm sharing a tip with you
10. 0:31on how you can actually improve one little
11. 0:34but significant detail of your work in PowerPoint.
12. 0:38Because there's one thing
13. 0:39that only a very few people know in PowerPoint,
14. 0:42and this is that, PowerPoint, by default,
15. 0:45messes up your text boxes.
16. 0:47If you insert a new text box in PowerPoint,
17. 0:50it will be messed up and not be created in a way
18. 0:53that you actually wanted to be
19. 0:55and that's actually helpful for you to work with it.
20. 0:57This video will show you why
21. 0:59and it will show you how to fix that.
22. 1:01So that by default, if you insert new text boxes,
23. 1:05they will look exactly like you need them
24. 1:08and in a helpful and constructive way.
25. 1:10This little detail I learned
26. 1:11in probably my first week at McKinsey
27. 1:13where one of the most senior associates
28. 1:15taught it to me because I created the pages
29. 1:18in a way that just were not good
30. 1:20because I made this specific error and did not fix that.
31. 1:23The video that you're seeing now
32. 1:24is an except of my course on
33. 1:26how to make PowerPoint presentations
34. 1:28the way that top management consultants do.
35. 1:30If you're interested to learn more,
36. 1:32feel free to look into the description below
37. 1:35where I have the link to the full course included.
38. 1:38I have more than 10,000 students taking the course
39. 1:42with literally hundreds of reviews.
40. 1:44So if you would like to learn more what the course is about
41. 1:46and whether it's interesting to you,
42. 1:48check it out and look at the link
43. 1:50to see more about it.
44. 1:51So now I would like to show you something
45. 1:53that will really help you to improve
46. 1:55the way you make your slides and your pages
47. 1:58and will really help you to spend less time
48. 2:01to align all the elements on your page.
49. 2:03It would be, I think, quite an improvement
50. 2:05of your workflow.
51. 2:06The topic is fix your text boxes.
52. 2:08The reason why I'm saying that is that
53. 2:10there's actually quite a problem
54. 2:12with the default text boxes in PowerPoint.
55. 2:15Let me just show you one example
56. 2:17to really make it clear what I mean.
57. 2:19Let's look at this page.
58. 2:20This is just a random example page
59. 2:22that I prepared here for you.
60. 2:24Now let's imagine this text box wouldn't be there.
61. 2:27So I delete it now.
62. 2:29And we wanted to include a new text box here.
63. 2:32So what would I do usually?
64. 2:33I would here, click on 'text box,'
65. 2:35in order for me to insert a new text box.
66. 2:38So click here to create a new one.
67. 2:40Now I'll type in some kind of text,
68. 2:42probably something like, I don't know.
69. 2:44So this is the column potential offerings,
70. 2:46so 'create new casino offering,'
71. 2:51something like that.
72. 2:52Obviously it doesn't make much sense now
73. 2:53but just as an example.
74. 2:55Let's include a bullet here.
75. 2:57Now you'll see the formatting is a bit off.
76. 2:59This is Calibri, the rest of the page is in Ariel.
77. 3:02So let's make this Ariel and I think the font size was 14.
78. 3:07So let's enter that as well.
79. 3:10Now the text box should be exactly like
80. 3:12these other text boxes.
81. 3:15Or is that maybe not the case?
82. 3:17What I want to show you is now the following.
83. 3:19Imagine how you want to nicely fit this new text box
84. 3:22in the page and by doing that we would like to
85. 3:25align it to this upper element here.
86. 3:27And aligning means that would really start here
87. 3:30at the left border of it.
88. 3:32And you see all the other text boxes
89. 3:34with their bullet points, they neatly start here
90. 3:37at the left edge of this element.
91. 3:40And this gives it a nice and clean look.
92. 3:43We will have the later section on alignment of elements.
93. 3:46But let's dive into it here at this point
94. 3:49and say we would like to align it to this left edge.
95. 3:52Probably the easiest way of doing that
96. 3:54would be to click here on 'arrange.'
97. 3:57'Align' and 'left.'
98. 4:01Now this is PowerPoint on a Mac.
99. 4:03I usually always also use the Windows version.
100. 4:06The guide I think looks a bit different
101. 4:08but you will find this arrange pendant
102. 4:10somewhere in your Windows PowerPoint as well.
103. 4:14Now we aligned it here on the left, right?
104. 4:16It is supposed to start here at the left corner.
105. 4:21Now maybe let's.
106. 4:22Whoops.
107. 4:24Let's try to center this a bit.
108. 4:27Like this.
109. 4:30Actually we need to move it up
110. 4:32in order to make it symmetric together.
111. 4:35Fine.
112. 4:36What is now the problem that we see with this element?
113. 4:39The problem is that if you look closely,
114. 4:42it isn't really starting at the left edge
115. 4:45of this thing.
116. 4:47You will see it if you mark all these objects,
117. 4:50that here the dot directly starts at the edge of the border
118. 4:54of the box, but here it doesn't.
119. 4:56There is some kind of distance in between.
120. 4:58And this is actually quite a problem
121. 5:00with the text boxes how they are created
122. 5:02as a default in PowerPoint.
123. 5:05Because if you create a new text box,
124. 5:07it automatically inserts a border to the left,
125. 5:10to the right, to the top, and to the bottom.
126. 5:13And this makes it really hard to neatly align
127. 5:16the text boxes to each other.
128. 5:17Because imagine now if all text boxes
129. 5:19would look like this text box.
130. 5:21Just to demonstrate that to you
131. 5:23I will now copy this format and apply it
132. 5:25to the other boxes.
133. 5:27If you don't know it, you can use this format icon here.
134. 5:30If you double click on it,
135. 5:31you can use it several times.
136. 5:35If I now click here, it gets transformed
137. 5:38to the format of the reference object
138. 5:40that was marked or highlighted in the beginning.
139. 5:44Now, of course, the size is out of bounds
140. 5:46but that is not really the issue.
141. 5:48We can just fix that.
142. 6:00Like that.
143. 6:03Now we've got to fix that as well
144. 6:04to where you can close it.
145. 6:08If we focus now here on the left border,
146. 6:10what's the problem?
147. 6:10The problem is that now
148. 6:12it isn't really neatly alignment here.
149. 6:14The issue is that there's literally no way
150. 6:17for me to, with the automatic alignment functions
151. 6:21that PowerPoints provide, to make it neatly start
152. 6:24here at the end.
153. 6:25Because if I use these autofitting guides,
154. 6:29it will just give me the guide on the edge of the border
155. 6:33but not really the guide where the point starts.
156. 6:35So the only thing I can do is manually try to
157. 6:39put it more or less closely to where I think
158. 6:41the right position is,
159. 6:43which is obviously super cumbersome.
160. 6:45And if you want to align lots of objects on your page,
161. 6:48it would take ages and it's just not a good work flow.
162. 6:51Let's go back to where it was before.
163. 6:58What you actually need to do
164. 6:59in order to fix this text box is the following.
165. 7:02You right click on it and click 'format shape.'
166. 7:06Then some kind of menu will pop up.
167. 7:09And here if you click on this icon here
168. 7:12and within the text box sub-menu,
169. 7:15you can 'resize shape to fit text'
170. 7:17and then, more important here,
171. 7:19the left margin, right margin,
172. 7:20top margin, and bottom margin.
173. 7:22And you should put these all to zero.
174. 7:28What you see now, now we've got this
175. 7:29kind of clean, neat, text box design.
176. 7:32And if we move it somewhere else,
177. 7:33and we want to realign it to this reference header box,
178. 7:37you just click align left.
179. 7:39It neatly starts on the exact same level
180. 7:41where the others start.
181. 7:43This is where it's supposed to be.
182. 7:47Now the next thing you can do,
183. 7:49because obviously it's quite annoying
184. 7:50to have to fix every single text box this way.
185. 7:53There's one function existing within PowerPoint
186. 7:55in order to make this text box style
187. 7:58the new default style.
188. 7:59And if you right-click on the text box,
189. 8:01on the border of the text box,
190. 8:03you get this possibility to 'set as default text box.'
191. 8:08If you click this, now PowerPoint knows
192. 8:10that we want all text boxes to be created
193. 8:12exactly in this way.
194. 8:15The next time that we insert a new text box,
195. 8:17let's do that right now.
196. 8:20I insert something,
197. 8:25I insert a random text in it,
198. 8:27and you're noticing that it looks exactly the way it should.
199. 8:29If we now align it to this text box,
200. 8:35'align left,' it's neatly aligned with all the other boxes.
201. 8:38And this is how we want it.
202. 8:40So here's my really important recommendation
203. 8:42that you set the text boxes exactly in this way.
204. 8:45You do not want to have any borders
205. 8:47around your elements that are automatically inserted.
206. 8:51Because otherwise the whole alignment process
207. 8:53within PowerPoint will not work properly.
208. 8:55It will just be a huge pain, huge pain,
209. 8:58to get neatly formatted and neatly aligned pages.
210. 9:01So do yourself this favor and it will help you
211. 9:04throughout the rest of the course.
212. 9:05Thank you for watching, everybody.
213. 9:07I hope you found this valuable.
214. 9:09Again, this is an excerpt of my full course
215. 9:12on creating top management slide presentations
216. 9:15in the way that companies like BCG or McKinsey do.
217. 9:18If you would like to learn more about it,
218. 9:20look into the description below
219. 9:22where I include the link.
220. 9:23If this video was at all helpful to you,
221. 9:26please press the like button.
222. 9:28If you would like to learn more
223. 9:29and keep watching other content
224. 9:32that I have prepared for you
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226. 9:35please subscribe to this channel
227. 9:37to stay posted about all the news
228. 9:39that I have lined up for you.
229. 9:41This is Heinrich from Firm Learning,
230. 9:43thank you for watching.